Please Take Your Hand Off My Thigh; Intimacy in Narrative Voice

I don’t trust the Huggers. You know the people I’m talking about: that guy you only met that one time at that party (the one where some asshole flushed the metal doorknob and no one could use the toilet all night), who, despite not having seen you in three years and misremembering your name, insists, when you run into him at the ABBA cover band concert, on shouting, “Dude, what is up?” And then hugging you.

Or that woman you work with who you hugs you every time you see her, saying, “It’s so good to see you!” as though you’re the survivor of a wrecked whaling ship lost two years at sea instead of the guy who works three doors down from her every day. I don’t think the Huggers are evil, mind you, and I love a good hug when the time is right, but I’m always a little leery when people I would definitely make no effort to save in a zombie apocalypse insist on hugging me warmly and repeatedly. As they’re patting me on the back, I want to whisper, “When the undead come, I will let you die…”

Which leads me to my point about third-person narration: just as there are physical huggers, there are narrative huggers. Oddly, though, while I’m wary of the former, I find that the latter can make for quite effective storytelling.

Narrative huggers? Take a look at these lines from David Eddings’ delightful and venerable novel Pawn of Prophecy:

“In the early autumn just before Garion’s fourteenth birthday, he came very close to ending his career. In response to some primal urge all children have – given a pond and a handy supply of logs – they had built a raft that summer.”

This seems to be an objective little bit of narration; we learn the season (autumn), the location (a pond), the unfolding action (raft-building), and the second sentence could read simply: “Garion and his friends had built a raft…” Only, the narrator isn’t content to furnish us with the facts only. He wants to comment on those facts, to make a larger point: it’s not only that these particular kids at this particular time are building a raft, he wants to remind us, but that all kids in similar circumstances will tend to build rafts.

This is a move away from the action at hand. Toward what? Toward you, reader. Prepare to be hugged. The assumed agreement here, the sense that this proclamation regarding kids and rafts is one that the reader will readily accept, provides a type of literary intimacy, a bond inviting trust between the storyteller and listener. “You know how kids are,” the narrator seems to say, “and so do I.”

Tolkien is a great hugger. Right near the start of The Hobbit, we find this sentence: “There is little or no magic about [hobbits], except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along…” The most obvious hug here is, of course, the assumption that the narrator and the reader are similar, that both are large, stupid blunderers. This sentence, however, asserts its intimacy in another way. The narrator claims that hobbit magic is “the ordinary everyday sort.” Both of these adjectives – ordinary, everyday – assume a shared frame of reference with the reader, shared values. In just the same manner as the Eddings narrator above, this narrator suggests, “We have the same view of the world. We will agree as to what constitutes ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ because we are fundamentally alike, you and I.”

Maybe a hug isn’t quite the right analogy here, but you can imagine the narrator pausing in his tale to wink or put a conspiratorial hand on a shoulder. Different readers have different tastes, and reasonable people can disagree over how much hugging and pawing they want from their narrators. There can be dangers with this approach, which I’ll get to in a future post, but I’m curious, at the moment, to hear how people respond when the narrator leans in close and puts a hand on your thigh. Do you pull away? Or let yourself be drawn in?